the hamlet of Pozzolengo to Solferino among the little hills eastward of Castiglione. When Austria in the summer of 1859 launched her ultimatum against little Piedmont, she suddenly found herself without a friend in Europe. Piedmont, so lately despairing, laughed for joy: "This," said Cavour, when the Chamber rose, "This is the last Piedmontese Chamber; the next will be that of the kingdom of Italy." It is true that the following week might have seen Turin in the hands of the enemy, that defeat meant annihilation; but that is all the Latin cause ever expected from the barbarians it has faced these three thousand years: it asked nothing better, for Italy cannot die. The war opened on April 26, and three days later the Austrians began to cross the Ticino into Piedmont. Their business was to crush the Piedmontese before the troops of France arrived. They outnumbered the Italians by nearly three to one, and their success must have seemed certain. What prevented it was what one always finds in a barbarian army, lack of decision in the leaders. Italy held the triangle between the Po and the Tanaro, and was not to be moved. Meanwhile, as of old, across the Alpine passes, swiftly from Genoa on the old highways, France poured the treasure of her sons, twenty thousand a day, and blunder after blunder saved the Italian cause, till the dazzling game of Garibaldi-the body of the French army having come up-opened the way to Magenta, where the heroism of the French guards won at nightfall, and Victor Emmanuel proclaimed the annexation of Lombardy to Piedmont. Then Modena fled, and Parma and Austria stood within the Quadrilateral behind the Mincio. In the van of the Italian advance upon this went Garibaldi and his red-shirts, but when the main army was come up, he was sent off to clear the Valtelline and hold the passes. France and Italy took up a position about Castiglione, to the south-west of the Lago di Garda. The Austrians, hoping to cut off the French divisions which were advancing from Lombardy, recrossed the Mincio on June 23, and occupied the hills of Solferino and S. Martino. In the dawn of S. John the French found the whole Austrian army before them, and the battle opened. The French took the centre in front of Solferino, the Piedmontese attacked the heights of S. Martino on the left, on the right Niel held the plain about Mèdole. The French advance on the centre lasted all day with terrible loss, and the heights were not won till evening: but they were won. The Piedmontese carried S. Martino five times, and for fourteen hours failed to turn the Austrians out of Pozzolengo: but they turned them out. To-day at S. Martino" della Battaglia " 'della Battaglia" a vast tower commemorates the heroism of that fight, in which the French lost some 12,000 men killed and wounded and the Piedmontese loss was relatively nearly as heavy. From Solferino it is but a step, and not much more from Castiglione, to Mèdole, where Titian's son Pomponeo Orazio in 1530, while still a boy, was granted by the Duke of Mantua a curacy. Later, the painter's nephew held this cure, and in his old age Titian painted a Christ in Glory appearing to the ascended Virgin Mary in the parish church. The picture remains there over the high altar. Behind Our Lord, stepping back into the shadow, are Adam holding the Cross and Eve; between Christ and Adam we also see Abraham and Noah. This is a work of about 1554, and worth any trouble to see. Thence on the road to Mantua we cross the Mincio at Goito, where indeed the Austrians crossed it, and so through Marmirolo and Porto Mantovano through a world of mists come into Mantua. OF CHAPTER XIII MANTUA F Mantua, forlorn upon her lakes, where over the pale green waters the red sails of the fishing boats pass, how languidly, under the casements, we have often dreamed in the winter over the fire in England, while turning the pages of the Mantuan. . . primus Idumaeas referam tibi, Mantua, palmas Nor is she less lovely than our dreams of her. A city of silver, her campanili shining in her ample sky, forlorn among her sedge and her still lagoons, she is even to-day the city of Virgil: Mantua, vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae Mantua, too near to wretched Cremona "—but it is not as the neighbour of Cremona that an Englishman is used to regard her, but as the close neighbour of Verona, the city to which Romeo came when he was banished after Tybalt's murder. The road by which Romeo came, though so few of us ever trouble to take it, is still open and still to be found. Dickens knew it, and has described it so well that it is a pleasure as well as a duty to recall his words. "Was the way to Mantua as beautiful (he writes) when Romeo was banished thither, I wonder? Did it wind through pasture land as green, bright with the same gleaming streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees? Those purple mountains lay on the horizon then for certain; and the dresses of these peasant girls, who wear a great knobbed silver pin through their hair behind, can hardly be much changed. Mantua itself must have broken on him in the prospect, with its towers and walls and water, as it does now. He made the same sharp twists and turns perhaps over the rumbling drawbridges; passed through the like long curved wooden bridge; and leaving the marshy water behind, approached the rusty gate of stagnant Mantua." It is almost the same to-day if you can be persuaded to come on foot or by carriage. And Mantua remains one of the most forlorn cities of Italy. Something of the stillness and silence of her lakes seems to have fallen upon this city of large and level spaces, of sunlight and shadow and all quietness. Gradually, imperceptibly, she is decaying in the damp of her lagoons, and is passing from us slowly, softly, little by little, bit by bit, as a dream passes. Here is surely no place of abiding. Yet Mantua is very old. It existed certainly long before the establishment of the Gauls in Italy, and Virgil, who knew all its legends and traditions, insists that it owed its origin to the Etruscans, which is certainly borne out by its name, derived, as is supposed, from the Etruscan divinity Mantus, though Virgil seems to have derived it from a prophetic nymph of the name of Manto. However that may be, it is certain that Mantua was of Etruscan origin, and, what is more, retained its Etruscan character long after the other cities of Cisalpine Gaul had lost it, by reason of its position entrenched behind its inaccessible marshes. When the Gauls came into Italy Mantua probably found itself within the power of the Cenomani, but it seems to have remained largely apart, and no mention of its name is to be found in history, nor do we know when it passed under the Roman dominion. Mantua, indeed, owes its fame under the Roman Empire entirely to Virgil, who was born here; he celebrated the city in several passages of his works, and its name is familiar on this account to many of the later Roman poets. With the fall of the Empire Mantua became more important on account of its old inaccessibility; for with the advent of the barbarians, barbarian conditions were restored and a place was valued not because it was easy to get at, but because it could not be reached. It fell, however, into the hands of the Lombards under Agilulf, and became a Lombard city. With the advent of the Franks into Italy, it was governed by the Counts of Canossa. In 1115, when the house of Canossa became extinct on the death of the great Matilda, Mantua constituted itself a free commune, participated in the wars of the two Lombard Leagues and suffered the assaults of Ezzelino da Romano, who threw down its walls, which were rebuilt in 1251. Like every other city in Italy at this time, Mantua was the scene of violent internal struggles between the nobili and the popolo and the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, till in 1276 the Buonacolsi seized the power, established a lordship, which had lasted, however, only some fifty years when in 1328 the Gonzaga turned them out. This family endured and succeeded in governing Mantua till 1708, first with the title of Capitani, but later as Marquises, and at last as Dukes. The first ruler of the house of Gonzaga was that Luigi who, leading the insurrection against Rinaldo Buonacolsi, had established himself in his place, and who in 1329 became Imperial Vicar for Louis the Bavarian. In his time Mantua numbered some 30,000 inhabitants, and ruled over an extensive contado. Guido Gonzaga, |